


between gods and monsters

by madasaboxofcats



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Angst, Canon compliant through 4.18, F/F, Martine doesn't actually die like the punk ass bitch she is but Root thinks about it a lot, Post 4.13, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-21
Updated: 2015-07-21
Packaged: 2018-04-10 09:01:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,276
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4385825
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/madasaboxofcats/pseuds/madasaboxofcats
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Being Her prophet used to be enough.</p>
            </blockquote>





	between gods and monsters

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to my insanely awesome and talented wife for the beta, and to my friend Kristen for kicking my butt in gear in the beginning when I didn't know quite where I was going.

\---

“I have come to realize that there is little difference between gods and monsters.” – The Machine, S4e10 “The Cold War” 

\--- 

“I know you can hear me.”

Yesterday, She told you to stop. Today, you came back because you couldn’t.

You dreamed of Sameen, twisting and falling and writhing, and you came back here because that can’t be the last picture you have of her, bleeding out in the bellows of the New York Stock Exchange because you asked her for help. 

Because you needed her.

The world is at war and you knew there would be casualties, you knew you wouldn’t all make it out alive – you just never thought it would be her (because you wouldn’t let it be her, it would be you before it would be her)(except it wasn’t you, and you don’t know if you should be angry at Shaw or at Samaritan or at Her but you’re angry at someone – everyone – and someone will pay.) 

(You know you are angry with yourself.) 

The Machine is dying, Sameen is gone – you won’t say “dead,” not yet, not until you see a body and have proof that you can touch – and no one will listen. Not Her, not Harold, not even John, who is as stubborn as you are and who _knows_ how this is. You think of Carter, brave and defiant and dead and of John walking away after, like you have done now.

They told you every life matters, so why doesn’t her life matter to anyone but you? 

“I’m waiting." 

You look ridiculous, probably insane, to anyone passing by who sees you pleading with the sky, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that you are talking and the Machine isn’t listening and you don’t know how to make Her answer.

You have only ever been Her mouthpiece, Her prophet. You have never been Her advisor.

Being the prophet used to be enough. 

You sit on the bench and stare at Her, waiting for an answer. 

She is your God. She won’t fail you, not now when you need Her most.

\---

You stay there until long after the sun sets.

The answer never comes.

\---

You do the same thing for three days after that. 

The questions never change: _Where is she? Is she alive? Can you find her? Why won’t you tell me? Is she alive? Tell me she’s alive. Please, talk to me. Talk to me. Talk to me._

You feel like you’re losing Her, too. 

She hasn’t been this quiet since the very first “Can you hear me?” and it scares you. Samaritan is growing, learning, and it’s only a matter of time before it finds Her, and, if you aren’t ready, before it kills Her. You think about calling Harold to see if She is still giving them numbers, and you even pick up the phone once, but you aren’t sure you could handle it if he tells you that they are, that the Machine is fine and just ignoring _you_.

When you first made contact, it was like coming up for air after a lifetime of being underwater. She filled your lungs with clarity and purpose and you knew who you were and what you were supposed to be doing. She needed you, and She was everything.

She still is. 

She became part of you (you think of a surgery performed in the middle of the night by a doctor who never knew your name), and Her silence feels like an amputation, like the tingling of phantom limbs.

Until now, you’ve been content with not knowing the answers. You do what She tells you to without knowing why, or what your actions will lead to because the Machine is always right and you’ve always trusted that. But this is different. You have never asked Her to reveal Her plan, and now you beg. 

“I need an answer” over and over and over again until your throat is scratchy with unshed tears and you feel nothing but sadness and rage. 

“Is she alive?” 

The question blazes through you like a fire you can’t extinguish, and She is the one who holds the water but sits there and watches you burn. 

\--- 

(Without your God and without your friends – without _her_ who sometimes feels almost as important as Her – who are you?)

\---

On the evening of the third day, She talks to you. 

For a second, your heart soars and a smile breaks out on your face for the first time since “Hey, Sweetie. You busy?” because She’s finally, finally listened. 

But She hasn’t. 

It is a new identity, a new costume, a new person to pretend to be while the Machine dies, while Shaw suffers, while everything around you crumbles into so much dust. 

You can’t play pretend anymore.

You won’t.

Standing up from the bench, you walk over to the camera and face her. 

“Is. She. Alive?”

Anger was never your default setting, but what you feel right now is earned. It is anger for three days of silence, anger for Sierra Tango Oscar Papa, for Shaw and you and everything you could have been to each other (everything you already were). It is anger that She is asking something of you while She refuses to give you the one answer you need to keep going. It is anger that the God you have faithfully served has abandoned you. 

Harold’s voice is in your ear – _We are only numbers to it. Code_.

You are all alone now and you are furious.

When She doesn’t answer, you turn and walk away. 

Things to do, people to kill.

(People to save.) 

\---

You ignore Her now but you know you’ll do what She says if She asks again.

It is your blessing and your curse, to live to serve Her. 

\---

Bullets fly. 

Two men on the right, one on the left. 

You have three firearms on you – two handguns (your Glock from your brief stint in the FBI, and Shaw’s sidearm) and the machine gun you borrowed from Shaw’s apartment. You figure she doesn’t get to complain about you breaking and entering (again) if you end up saving her life. 

Because she’s alive, she has to be.

The first guy on the right charges – all brawn and no brain – and you almost laugh when you shoot him in the knee and use his stupid, brawny body as a shield as the other two take their shots.

By your count, they can’t have more than a dozen rounds left between them, and that’s exactly what you want.

Capture, not kill.

Can’t get information from a dead man. 

(You know, you’ve tried.) 

You duck behind the driver’s side door to reload the handguns as another rain of bullets comes your way. Springing for an SUV with some bulletproofing turned out to be an excellent idea (and by “springing for,” you mean “hotwiring and stealing from an NYPD parking garage”).

The “click click click” of a weapon out of ammo is unmistakable and you can’t stop the grin on your face. 

You are out in front of the car now, weapon aimed at the guy on the right who looks like he’s trying to decide whether to run or attack. He doesn’t get a choice. Two shots – one to the knee, one to the shoulder, and he is face first on the ground. 

Two down, one to go. 

Doing this without the Machine in your ear is different – maybe you’ve gotten too accustomed, too dependent on Her to be confident in your own instincts. Your instincts tell you now that the last guy is still here, he hasn’t left, but you can’t see him. The adrenaline sets your nerves on fire, crawling up the back of your neck and you know you’re missing something.

You double over in pain before you realize you’ve been hit. The pavement scrapes at your knees as you hit the ground and you clutch your side as he towers above you. He isn’t huge but you’re kneeling and don’t have time to get your legs under you before he comes at you again.

He pins you and this is not how this was supposed to go at all. 

It’s a good thing you had lessons. 

He’s in guard position. Palms to his shoulders. Elbows lock. 90 degree angle to your bodies. Hold.

He tries to punch your head. You dodge. He hits in the ground instead. 

You’re in control. 

Slide hips right. Left foot on his hip. Extend. Kick off. 

Slide out. Kick. Groin. Solar plexus. Chin. 

Now you’re on your feet and he’s on the ground, clutching his junk and you think you might see the tiniest bit of moisture in his beady little eyes.

Shaw would be proud.

(As proud as she gets, anyway.)

Lefty convulses when you tase him, his arms go out from under him, and he ends up with a face full of asphalt.

The taser goes back in your pocket, you wipe your hands on your pants, peeling out bits of rock that have embedded themselves in your palms, and you breathe. 

This is the third set of operatives you’ve hunted this week and, if you’re being honest, this routine is getting a little old. 

You shoot out a camera.

Samaritan comes running.

There’s a chase and shootout and you get some shots in and they get some shots in – the graze on your leg from yesterday still burns but the pain strengthens you, reminds you what you’re fighting for – you capture them, question them, play with them, and they give you nothing because they know nothing because they are useless.

You look at the operative on the ground in front of you, still quivering from the electricity. Lefty here? Lefty might know something. He’s a grunt, but you’re 70% sure he’s a grunt who was at the Stock Exchange. 

It’s been nine days since the Stock Exchange. Nine days of no leads and no progress and nothing but anger and frustration.

You wish She was here with you now. She could tell you, run his face through Her databases to be sure.

But She is silent and you’re on your own.

You grab Lefty and do your best to shove him into the car without hurting yourself.  

Sirens wail in the distance. 

You get the second and third guys into the car too. 

“Let’s get out of here, boys.” 

\--- 

The motel room is sparse but you’ve seen worse. There’s a bed, a desk, a chair, and enough floor space to store whoever you don’t interrogate first. It looks almost exactly like the rooms you’ve used for the last two interrogations, and you made it out of those with plenty of time to spare before the police arrived. 

Dumpy motels like these, no one is really surprised if there’s a little screaming. 

So the room isn’t a cage in an underground subway station where no one can hear you no matter how loud you yell, but it’ll do. 

(If Shaw were here, you’d leer at her about testing out the soundproof-ness of your new home base.)

(She’d roll her eyes and you’d smile.)

Samaritan’s operatives are still knocked out. You ready your supplies. Eat a sandwich. Watch some TV. It kind of reminds you of the old days, before you found Harold and the Machine, when the hardest thing you had to do in a day was kill a guy and collect a paycheck for it. 

And now you’re trying to save your friend (friend isn’t the right word, but you can’t think of a better one) from becoming a casualty in a war between two artificial super intelligences, one of which, up until recently, lived in your ear and doled out instructions to a hodgepodge group of hackers, government assassins, a cop, and a dog, who She had tasked with keeping the world afloat. 

The war is here and She is losing and you are afraid. 

You are afraid of what will happen if Samaritan kills Her, you are afraid for Harold and Reese and Fusco, you are afraid for Shaw and for yourself and for what you will have to do, the decisions you will make when the time comes. Your loyalties lie with Her because She is the big picture and part of you knows that you will be there when She calls and tells you it’s time, whether you have Shaw with you or not. 

The other part of you is angry enough to think that you’ll never do Her bidding again because of all She’s hidden from you, all that you’ll have to do to find the answers that She is unwilling to share. 

(Is she alive? Is she alive? Is she alive?) 

One of your captives begins to stir. 

You turn off the TV.

You’ve got two of them on the floor, one in the chair – the one who was there, who knows – and you are practically giddy at the idea that this could be it, the lead that will bring you to her. 

“Good morning, sunshine.” 

Lefty stirs, blinks at you like he’s not quite sure where he is or why he’s there. 

“I hear they’ve been talking about me, your little friends who I sent scurrying back to the nest yesterday. All good things, I hope?” 

He grunts. 

“We’re going to have a little chat. And you’re going to tell me everything I want to know about Samaritan and what they’ve done with my friend Sameen and as long as you do that, I don’t maim, disfigure, or kill you. Deal?” 

He avoids your eyes and doesn’t say anything. 

“Okay, you’re not feeling chatty. Let’s start with some show and tell. I’m going to show you my friend’s picture, and you’re going to look at it for however long it takes to remember where she is, and then you’re going to tell me.” 

The photo is in your pocket, not in the best shape, but it’s clear enough and you stick it in his face. He looks at it, at you, back at it.

“Nope. Never seen her.”

Punk.  

“Wrong answer. Try again. Short, good with a gun, perpetually grumpy.”

“Not ringing any bells.” 

The more you look at him, the more you think you remember his face from that night. He was there, he saw her, and he’s lying now. 

“The first time I met my friend,” you muse, walking around behind Lefty to play with your stash of toys, “I tased her, just like I did to you. And I ziptied her to a chair, just like that.” 

He squirms and your smile widens. Somewhere in the middle of “being good,” you almost forgot how much fun this could be. 

“I asked her questions and when she wouldn’t give me answers, I showed her this.” He balks at the iron you wave in his face, slinking back into the chair as far as he can go, his face turned into his shoulder like this show of cowardice will have any effect at all on what you do to him. 

You wet your finger with your mouth and touch the bottom of the iron, momentarily taken by sharp pain and nostalgia. It is hot and ready and the electricity of the moment pumps through you (maybe this one knows something, maybe he will tell, and wouldn’t that be the best story? Information to save her taken from the same kind of torture you inflicted on her?) and you raise the iron to his cheek. 

“I didn’t hurt her face, though. It would’ve been a shame to ruin something so lovely.” 

If you press the iron down now, you’ll get the whole left side of his face – cheek, eye, nose, mouth. The scars will be with him the rest of his life (if you let him go). He will walk down the street and people will stare, whispering behind his back, but not subtly because people are almost never as subtle as they think they are and he will hear them. Children will point and laugh, or run away in horror. The world will see him for the monster that he is. 

You don’t think too much about the monster you are. 

The monster in you is righteous. Justified. 

“Your face, on the other hand, is not as nice to look at.” 

The iron is maybe two inches above his face now, his eyes are squeezed shut, and you are close, so close to bringing it down and ending him like you want to. Ending him for being a part of all of it, for working for them, for shooting her down and taking her away. It doesn’t matter that he wasn’t the one who pulled the trigger. Everyone working for Samaritan had a hand in it and, as far as you’re concerned, they all need to pay. 

(There’s a special hell waiting for Martine.) 

You are so close, but you need information first. 

“Tell me,” you keep your voice soft, non-threatening, “where they took her.”

He opens his eyes and looks at you, some mix of defiant and afraid. “Lady, I told you – I don’t know anything about your friend. All I do is what they tell me.”

“Oh? And what did they tell you this time?”

“To fix the camera, that’s it.”

“Okay, let me get this straight. They sent you to fix a camera and you just happened to pack a semi-automatic weapon in your toolbox? My, my, what a coincidence.” 

He looks young – 18, maybe 20 – and you wonder not for the first time if the Machine shouldn’t be recruiting expendable people like him. People who will take orders without question and fight in a war they don’t understand. Harold would never go for it and neither would She, but you aren’t as sentimental. You know now that all lives have value, but you aren’t naïve enough to think that all lives have equal value. Some mean more than others. 

(You think of _“I kind of enjoy this sort of thing”_ and “ _there are things I care about here_ ”and your hand shakes just a little. Lefty flinches.) 

“And what about the Weasley twins over there?” 

You point to the other two you captured today, bound and gagged on the floor and watching every minute of what you do to their friend.

“You just happened to need them and their weapons to fix a little camera, too?”

He doesn’t say anything. 

You wait. Move the iron a little closer. If he so much as sneezes, he’ll make impact. 

“Who do you report to?”

 Silence.

“Did you happen to ask your friends what I did to them when they wouldn’t help me? The hotel I took them to didn’t have an iron. We had to improvise.” 

You look over at your collection of knives and guns and his eyes follow. He breathes, swallows. He’s thinking about lying to you again, telling you he doesn’t know her, telling you he wasn’t there. 

“When the girl from yesterday – what was her name? Carrie? Krystal? Kristen? – lied to me like you’re lying to me now, her tongue accidentally ran into my knife over there. You wouldn’t want to have any accidents, would you?”

“No.”

“I saw you at the Stock Exchange. I know you were there.” 

He finally looks properly scared. 

His words come out in a rush. “I saw them loading some chick with dark hair into the van. That’s all I know.” 

Samaritan’s operatives will probably kill him when he gets back to wherever they are – the two sitting on the floor will tell their superiors that he talked and that’ll be it. But that’s not your problem. 

Everything freezes. 

“I want you to listen to me very closely right now and think long and hard about the answer to my next question. If I find out that you are lying to me about this, I will hunt you down and I will give you the most painful, drawn-out death that I can think of, and I’m pretty creative. When you saw her, was she alive?” 

Two beats.

“She kicked Curtis in the nuts before they strapped her down.”

Of course she did. 

(She’s alive she’s alive she’s alive.)

“Where did they take her?”

Your heart races and there is an urgency that wasn’t there before. She is _alive_ and with Samaritan’s people and who knows how long they’ll keep her that way, how long they’ll try to break her before they realize that no one can break Sameen Shaw unless she lets them.

“Where did they take her?”

“I don’t know.”

You’re almost shouting now.

“Where is she?”

“I said I don’t know!” 

You press the top of the iron into his forehead. You can smell the burning skin. He screams. 

“Tell.” 

The iron rolls down another inch. More screaming. More burning. 

“Me.” 

There’s no one here to pull you back this time. Not Reese or Harold or the Machine. 

“Where.” 

The iron covers his cheek. 

“She.”

Flesh sizzles. 

“Is.” 

So this is who you are when no one is watching.

\---

The camera blinks. 

You can feel Her disapproval. 

“I wouldn’t have had to do that if you had helped me.” 

You’re not angry at Her right now, just sad. 

“Help me. Please.”

Silence. 

\--- 

As it turns out, She needs you to help Her.

Her timing is terrible but She’s dying and She will always be your top priority.

You feel a flash of guilt for failing Shaw again, but She gives you meaning and you are afraid of who you would be without Her. Shaw would understand; you’re not her top priority either. It must look strange, the two of you as entangled as you are – the zealot who loves her God and the sociopath who loves herself. Neither of you is everything to the other but both of you are enough. 

(You remember a kiss and a shove and the scream of bullets tearing through flesh. She put you first, in the end.) 

You think of Lefty and his scarred face and the lead that you can’t follow up on just yet because you have a Higher Calling and you want to curse and shout at the injustice of it all. You’re here and you’ll do what She asks, but that doesn’t mean you won’t be angry about it. 

But you don’t curse and you don’t shout.

You put on lipstick, look in the mirror, and say hello to whoever you’re supposed to be today.

\--- 

Shooting Claire Mahoney and a bunch of Samaritan’s operatives almost makes up for having to temporarily abandon your pursuit of Shaw. 

You know a little about Claire from Harold’s last encounter with her. _Samaritan is recruiting_ , he had told you, _and Claire is as bright and headstrong as I imagine you were at 19. Ms. Groves, I am sure I don’t need to tell you how dangerous it is to have someone like her working for Samaritan._

Part of you wishes you’d shot her somewhere other than her shoulder. But then you wouldn’t have been able to give her your message that you so desperately hope she relays to Greer and Martine and Samaritan itself. You’ve sent messages with some of the others, but she’s the closest to the mainframe, you think, and maybe she’ll make more of an impact. 

Harold is still shaking as he climbs into the passenger seat of the car you stole and you are glad that She called you here. Shooting Samaritan agents might not quite be worth suspending your larger plan, but saving him was, and you’re sure that he would be halfway to Samaritan headquarters if you hadn’t intervened.

You can’t stomach the idea of both Harold and Shaw lost because you failed them. 

The drive is quiet for a while. Harold looks out his window and you navigate through the streets of New York, and neither of you really knows what to say.

“I suppose I owe you a debt of gratitude, Ms. Groves, though I’m not entirely sure why you came back, given your most recent directive from the Machine. I thought we’d seen the last of you.”

“I’m not going to let anyone hurt you, Harry.” You try to smile at him.

It’s rich, you think, given the way your relationship began, but you mean it as much as you’ve ever meant anything. Once, you thought that you were at peace with the sacrifices that had to be made to win this war, but you are too invested in these people now for that to be entirely true. Sameen, Harold, even John, who you never particularly liked, but who accepts the ugly parts of you like he understands them in a way the others don’t.

If you go down, an increasingly likely possibility with the way things are playing out, you will go down together and you will go down fighting. 

“What of your search for Ms. Shaw?”

He is quiet, like he’s afraid of the answer. You aren’t sure if he’s afraid that you’ve stopped, or afraid of what you’ve done to keep looking. Harold, more than anyone, is aware of what you’re capable of, and he’s always treated you with accompanying caution. But he cares about you anyway, and you’ve never quite figured how he’s managed to reconcile both fear and affection. 

You told him once that he was weak for caring about people. You wonder if that weakness can now be ascribed to you as well, if your care for Shaw might bring everything tumbling to the ground. 

“I don’t want to talk about Sameen.” 

“Ms. Groves, I know Ms. Shaw meant a great deal to you –“ 

“I said I don’t want to talk about her, Harold.”

You drive back to the subway station and you think more about recruitment, about sacrificing other people’s families instead of your own. It’s selfish, but you’ve never shied from your selfishness. 

\--- 

When you sleep, you see them both now. Harold and Sameen. Harold sinking to the floor in front of a row of computers, blood pouring from his chest, and Sameen dancing behind a desk as bullets take her over. You can only scream, locked in a cage of your own making.

\---

The warehouse Lefty told you about is empty when you get there. 

It’s not where they’re holding her, he had said, but it’s where they all went afterwards, where Samaritan’s agents regrouped and then parted ways. You hadn’t gotten anything else out of him, but this had been enough to hold you, to get you through the missions you didn’t understand, the tasks that She had you complete that, for the first time, seemed meaningless. 

You’re not 100% convinced that She isn’t sending you on wild goose chase after wild goose chase to keep you from going after Shaw. Why, you don’t know, because you thought Sameen meant something to Her. You thought you all did. 

Maybe Harold was right. 

He’d told you something once about how you were all replaceable. How the Machine would cast you aside and replace you without thought. You hadn’t believed him then, you had thought that you were special (all of you, but especially _you_ ) and that She would be there when it came down to the wire.

Maybe he’s right and you are interchangeable. She can replace Shaw with Zoe or Fusco or any number of others, and not be affected. And maybe he’s wrong and She’s not helping you because you aren’t interchangeable at all, because you are Her creation as much as She is Harold’s and She won’t let you go. You aren’t sure which would be worse. 

Once you’ve swept the perimeter, you tuck your guns into the back of your pants and get to work. You’ve searched plenty of warehouses like this, tracking down rogue CEOs or cheating forklift operators and your search now brings a certain element of nostalgia. The room isn’t the biggest you’ve ever seen, but it isn’t the smallest either. There are probably a dozen rows of metal shelving, all stacked with boxes that look like they’ve been sitting there for months, if not years, judging by the layer of dust that coats the tops of them. 

At the center of the room is a desk, where shipping orders were probably managed when the warehouse was functional. There are papers strewn around it, like a storm has ripped through, and you don’t understand why until you get closer. 

The smeared, red stain on top of the desk makes your throat close and your stomach turn. The papers, too, are dotted with dried blood and your world gets very, very small. You can feel the rage building (it never really left) and you wish that there were someone here, anyone, who you could make suffer for what they have done to her. 

The stain is bigger than you want it to be. You’re not a doctor, but you’ve killed enough people to know the effects of that kind of blood loss. 

There is a pair of scissors on the edge of the desk, and what looks like pieces of gauze mixed in with the papers on the floor, and you pray that they patched her up enough, that she didn’t bleed to death on this desk, or in the back of some van on the way to Samaritan’s next hiding spot. 

At least they seem to be trying to keep her alive. 

You try not to think about why, or what they’ll do to her when she heals. 

You swab the blood stain, pick up the scissors and put them both in one of the evidence bags you brought with you – today you are Augusta King, FBI – and kneel down to sort through the papers. Your guns pinch the skin of your lower back and you lean into the pain, desperate to feel something physical to distract you from the twisting your insides have been doing since you saw the blood. 

You need to think now, not feel. 

The papers are a combination of warehouse papers and Samaritan documents. An invoice for 4000 boxes of ballpoint pens. A blueprint of the Stock Exchange. A shipment receipt from 2012. A blurry, security camera picture of Sameen. It’s something, some insight into how they run, but it’s not enough for you to get a full picture, and it’s not enough to lead you to where Shaw is.

You throw the picture back to the floor with as much force as you can manage, but it defiantly flutters to the ground.

This isn’t how you do things and you’re frustrated. You are good at finding people, hunting them, but you’ve never had to do it so primitively – without Her, without a human operation to infiltrate, without a computer. You look at the security cameras. You’ve counted twenty-eight inside – one staring down each row of shelving, and one in each corner of the main room. They aren’t blinking now – you disabled them before you got here – but you think about the information they must contain. Video of Shaw, information on where they may have taken her, on where they may have come from, on who all may be involved. 

If you could hack the cameras without being detected, the world would open up. 

But Samaritan is too smart, and while you’re perfectly willing to sacrifice your own life, you can’t risk the lives of Harold and John and Daizo and Jason and Daniel. Your code is too much a part of you for Samaritan not to notice, and your cover – along with theirs – would be blown and you’d all be nothing more than sitting ducks. 

So you gather things that might have fingerprints and you sort through meaningless pieces of paper and you pray to a God that isn’t listening because you don’t know what else to do. 

_Samaritan agents Oxley, Jarrett, Martinez, Roush, Gardner, Lee, Lambert approaching. 500 meters from south. Evacuate now._

Your guns are back in your hands and your bag is on your shoulder and you’re running toward the exit. You can handle three Samaritan soldiers without batting an eye, but seven would be suicide. You contemplate letting them take you, trying to get at them from inside, but you don’t have any evidence that they won’t kill you on sight – they have Sameen, what need would they have for another Machine operative? – so you slip out the back door. 

Someone shouts orders at the front. They’ve seen you, and you have to move fast if you want to stay alive. 

The car starts without issue and you’re speeding down the back alley to get to the street. One operative – small, Asian, female – shoots at the car, hits the top and the side but nothing important, and you’re out on the street and gone before another agent can join her. It’s nearly midnight and, for once, New York is quiet. 

When you’re driving down the highway back towards a hotel room you booked under another fake identity, She gives you directions, tells you what turns to take to avoid detection. You feel, for a moment, like you’re whole again, driving fast towards something important, the greater purpose She built you for.

You try not to think about Shaw. 

You fail.

Your voice wavers when you ask the one question you’ve avoided until now. You aren’t sure if you want the answer, but you need to ask just the same. “Why won’t you tell me where she is?”

She answers later, when you’re almost asleep, and when you wake up in the morning, you wonder if you dreamed it. 

_Evaluated probability of mission success. Asset: Analog Interface: Alias: Samantha Groves/Root. Chance of survival: 12.67%. Outcome undesirable._

\---

Sri Lanka drips with sweat.

You work at a little Internet café off a side street in a small town outside of Colombo. A fan rotates and whirrs in the corner, but it isn’t enough to temper the heat or dilute the smell of too many people in too small a space. This is the only place to get Internet in this town where She has sent you, and it’s populated both by local teenagers looking to connect with the rest of the world and off-the-beaten-path tourists who just want to check their email.

The tank top you picked out this morning clings to your skin, and you can feel the wet patch at the small of your back where your sweat has pooled. The baby hairs at your temples have escaped your ponytail, frizzing and curling around your face like they did when you were a child in Texas and everything was simpler. 

Your number is the owner and if he’s noticed your presence every day, 6 hours a day, for the last three days, he hasn’t said anything. Which is fine by you – watching him isn’t the only thing you’re working on here in this little café. 

Claire Mahoney’s phone sits in front of you, plugged in to the computer modem, and you tap away at the keyboard. There is some kind of self-deleting software coded into the phone’s operating system that you haven’t been able to crack yet. It operates unlike any you’ve ever seen and for a while you just admire its beauty, its intricacy. Samaritan could make you love it, with its delicate code and complex algorithmic structures, if it weren’t evil and hell-bent on destroying your world and the people you care about.

Not for the first time, you are grateful She found you first. You shudder to think of what might have happened if you’d found Samaritan before She had taught you that people were more than just bad code. 

She’s talking to you here, and it feels like coming home even though you’re thousands of miles from everything familiar. There aren’t any Samaritan agents within a five-hour flight, so She is a little freer to speak, and when She does, part of you feels like She missed you, too.

Still, even though it’s a little safer here than at home, you’re being careful about leaving too much of a trail, signing too much of your name in your code when you try to hack Claire’s phone. You’re not trying to hack Samaritan’s systems, necessarily. If you can isolate the phone from Samaritan’s network, you can pull metadata from the phone and analyze it – extract GPS information from the deleted pictures, videos, text messages. This phone should have enough GPS data to lead you right to wherever Greer’s people assemble. It’s not a direct link to Shaw – who knows where they’re keeping her? – but it’s enough to keep you moving forward. 

You haven’t thanked Her yet for having your back at the warehouse, but there are a lot of conversations you haven’t had yet, and you try not to think too hard about the questions you’re not asking and the things that you’re not saying. The number keeps you busy, and for now you are content to revel in the feeling of having Her back. The hard questions and the answers you don’t want to face can wait a bit. 

The number’s name is Kyle McKinley. He is an American ex-pat who came here eight years ago from Muncie, Indiana and the Machine thinks that he’s in with a developing terrorist group based out of Syria. He doesn’t do much when he’s at work, managing this dank and stifling Internet café, but the company he keeps in his off hours – known terror threats and a hodgepodge of disgruntled international recruits – is interesting enough.

From what you can tell, they have a small group of men en route to Chicago to detonate a bomb, but you haven’t been able to ascertain where specifically their bomb is located. Once you have a location and can make an anonymous call to the Chicago division of the ATF, you can eliminate the threat and head back to New York. 

It’s almost closing time, and the other patron in the café – a middle aged woman who wears sunglasses on her head and a fanny pack around her middle – packs up her things and leaves, the bell above the door ringing on her way out. The crowd has been thinning over the past hour, people going home to their families or their tour groups, and you’re left alone with the number.

The fan blows past you, your hair wisping out of your ponytail piece by piece, and it’s finally starting to feel cooler, though no less sticky in this hole in the wall. You type another line of code into your computer. 

 _Threat watching. Activate cover._

You bring up a screen with a half-written fake email to Harold, and you add another line about how much you hope to see a tiger tomorrow before you feel the number behind you. 

“Ma’am, I’m sorry to interrupt, but we are closing soon. If you could finish your business in the next few minutes, I’d sure appreciate it.”

He sounds like an old southern boy, so different when talking to you than when speaking angry Arabic into his phone last night when he thought no one was listening. 

“Oh, my. Of course. I’m so sorry to keep you – it’s my first time here and I’m really terribly homesick.” 

You are Jennifer Manning, Catholic missionary and disgruntled former attorney, seeking yourself and the Lord. You finger the cross pendant around your neck and give him a meek smile. 

“It’s hard,” he empathizes, “being far from home.” 

His faux-sympathetic smile says he’s hoping to get lucky and, although you want to punch him in the face for his arrogance, you know you can use it, so you bat your eyelashes and try not to gag.

“It is. Especially since I don’t really know anyone here. My mission partners have all been here before and they know the lay of the land, so to speak.” 

He puts on his most charming smile. “Well, I can show you around a bit, if you’d like. I have to close up here, but maybe we can grab a drink?” 

You really, really hope this leads to good information. 

\--- 

What it leads to is Kyle McKinley knocked out out on the floor of the café after he tries to make a move up your skirt.

Pig.

At least you got what you were looking for – you called the Chicago ATF office and told them to check out Wrigley Field. It was easy enough to get him to give up his favorite place in Chicago (he’s from Indiana, you tell him you’re from Illinois, ask him if he’s ever been, easy easy easy), and with a couple of quick questions to Her, you confirm that there was a report of suspicious activity at about 10 this morning. 

So he’s lying on the floor. You’ll shoot him before you leave, but for now you’re content to stay here another hour or two and work before you go back to your hotel to get some sleep. 

You type another line of code into the computer and you think you might be getting close. 

The phone whirs. It unlocks. 

“Hello, Ms. Groves.” 

Greer’s face pops up on the screen. It’s a video, something pre-recorded and sent to this phone, probably when they realized you had picked it up off the ground after you ambushed Claire and her Samaritan pals. 

“I see you’ve hacked into Ms. Mahoney’s phone. Well done. Unfortunately for you, this video is all you’ll find. Still, I imagine that there are aspects of it that you will find…intriguing.” 

The camera leaves Greer and you can feel the seconds stretch as it turns to find another focal point. You know what he’s doing, what you’ll see when the camera stills. 

Knowing it doesn’t prepare you for the sight of her, though, and your heart lodges somewhere in your throat, buoyant and heavy at the same time.   

The first thing you notice is that she is alive. Brilliantly, beautifully alive. Her face is pale and she looks like she’s been run over by a truck, but she’s blinking and breathing and scowling at everyone. She’s in what looks like a hospital room, monitors attached to her hands, beeping information you don’t understand. 

She is alive and relatively whole and that is almost more than you dared to hope for. 

The second thing you notice is that she is not alone. Martine stands next to her, as much Greer’s guard dog as Reese is Harold’s, and your desire to end her burns hot. Somewhere beneath her hospital gown, Shaw is riddled with bullet holes, held together by gauze, and it is almost as much her fault as it is your own. 

(The moment replays in your head over and over – Martine standing over Shaw, the gun sounding as you lose sight of them. Martine smiling with a gun in her hand.) 

You have thought of every way possible to make that woman suffer. You've wanted to torture her, make her hurt and cry and beg for her life. 

But now that you see her standing next to the bed, ready to move at Greer’s command, you really just want her dead so that she can’t hurt Shaw ever again. 

A bullet to the head. A snap of the neck. Something fast. 

Greer turns the camera back to himself. 

“As you can see, Ms. Groves, your Ms. Shaw is alive and well and enjoying Samaritan’s considerable hospitality. I’d like to extend an invitation to you to join us.” 

Bile rises in your throat. The only thing keeping you from throwing the phone against the wall is the chance that the camera may pan over to Shaw again and you’ll be able to see for a second time that she didn’t bleed out on the floor of the Stock Exchange. 

“Now before you do something violent, please listen to our proposal. Martine and I make lovely hosts, and, as our special guest, we will make sure you are very comfortable. We simply would like to show you what Samaritan is really about.”

The camera leaves Greer’s face and returns to Shaw. 

“Why don’t I let you two have a moment, hmm?” 

He must hand the camera to Shaw because it shakes and loses focus for a second – walls, ceiling, hospital gown – and then she’s back and _oh_ , you forget what it is to breathe. 

“The food here sucks.” 

You laugh, and it’s the lightest you’ve felt in weeks. She’s alive and she’s _her_. 

“Don’t even try the fucking steak. It’s an insult to cows everywhere.” 

She shifts a little and the hospital bed squeaks. You see a flash of Martine’s hand in the frame, somewhere near Shaw’s neck (maybe you won’t make her death fast – maybe you’ll break that hand first) and Shaw brings the camera closer to her face and looks right into it. 

“Listen, Root.” 

The pause is lengthy and your heart rate quickens.

“I know you don’t want to hear this, but Samaritan isn’t the enemy here.”

No. 

No no no no no.

“When we first met you, you were pissed as hell that Harold didn’t let the Machine reach its full potential. You wanted to free it or whatever. Well, this is it, Root. This is what you were looking for.”

Nonononono. 

“We could take out so many bad guys. So many more than the Machine ever could.” 

This isn’t real. 

“I’d even let you share my room and my shitty food.” 

This can’t be real. 

“Think about it. _Please_.” She bats her eyelashes and you can feel the pull of her as if she were here with you. You wonder if she is trying to remind you of a time when things were different, a little simpler (though not much), when a “please” almost undid you in the middle of the sidewalk with her life on the line.

You want to scream, but nothing comes out. You just sit there and watch as Shaw passes the camera back to Greer. 

“So you see, Ms. Groves, you’d be in good company. Imagine how delighted we were to see that you and Ms. Shaw are so…close.”

You look at Shaw’s face behind him and you forget how to breathe. 

“We will know when you’ve viewed this video. You will receive a phone call in 24 hours with instructions should you choose to accept our offer. Should you decline, simply ignore the phone call. I’m sure we can find ways to encourage Ms. Shaw to provide us with the information we seek.” 

The video ends. 

You look at the relevant number, still lying on the floor in front of you. 

You shoot him more times than you need to.

\--- 

The floor thunders under your feet as you pace in front of the bed in your hotel room. 

You thought you'd prepared yourself for every possibility – Sameen dead, Sameen dying, Sameen just gone – but not this. Not Shaw turning her back on you, on Finch, John, not her asking you to join Samaritan. 

They’ve brainwashed her somehow, you’re sure of it. Shaw was never loyal to the Machine, but she was loyal enough to your team (to _you_ ) to give up her own life, and that has to mean something. 

(A kiss, a shove, and the scream of bullets – over and over again repeated in your head since that day. A kiss, a shove, and the scream of bullets.) 

She is a soldier, a good one, and she’s been fighting by your side for so long that you hardly remember a time when she wasn’t. She fought with you, for you, even before the others accepted you as one of their own. 

(They still tiptoe around you, but she never has.)

Her loyalty isn’t in question. 

Thinking about what they must have done to her to make her say those things makes you feel sick, so you try not to, but the images keep coming. 

You remember a conversation you had with Harold on your first outing together, after you had strung up Denton Weeks, hands and feet tied, hood over his head. _Amazing how the human brain can be manipulated_ , you had told him. If you were still who you used to be and you were trying to get information from Shaw, you know exactly how you’d try to break her. You know which buttons you’d push, which senses you’d stimulate, which necessities you’d take from her in order to make her talk. 

You’d tear her down, and then you’d build her back up in a way that was useful to you. You’d try, anyway. Before now, you hadn’t thought anyone could break Shaw. 

But you could. You could break her if she’d let you (and she would). You could break her like she’s broken you, from the inside out, in the worst and the best possible way.

(The two of you together, you’d break each other over and over again.) 

But they’ve broken her now, before you even had the chance. 

Shaw fighting with Samaritan, against you, is something you can’t even fathom. If this war isn’t lost already, it certainly would be with her on the other side.

Taking Greer up on his offer isn’t even a question. When he calls, you’ll answer the phone and you’ll do whatever he wants until you can get inside and get Sameen out. If they try to kill you, fine, but you’re not going down without a fight, and you’re not going to sit here doing nothing while they do god knows what to her. 

You’ve been enough people in the last few months. What’s one more? The lovesick voice of Samaritan’s nemesis, crazed enough by your own longing to switch sides in a war that’s only just begun. Another face, another part to play.

_Warning. Samaritan Asset: John Greer. Offer made to Analog Interface pretext for capture. Evaluating probability of mission success. Chance of survival: 7.62%. Outcome undesirable._

You almost laugh. You don’t need Her to tell you it’s a trap. You know it is. You just can’t make yourself care all that much. 

She’s been spouting warnings in your ear since you left the Internet café. You have no doubts about where She stands, but no doubts about where you do, either. 

“And what are Sameen’s odds if I don’t go? Tell me that.” 

 _Calculating. Asset: Sameen Shaw. Chance of survival: 12.09%_ “And if I do?” 

 _Calculating. Asset: Sameen Shaw. Chance of survival: 39.72%._

You stop pacing, you look at the camera on your laptop, and you smile. It’s not much, but it’s enough.

_Requesting Analog Interface decline Samaritan offer._

“Request denied. I’m not leaving her behind. Not again.” 

You probably look insane, all teeth and smiles and hope, but you’ve beaten slimmer odds before, and there isn’t a doubt in your mind that Shaw is worth the risk. 

You allow yourself a fantasy of the two of you, shooting your way out of wherever they’re keeping her, all innuendo and deflection, but both of you knowing where you stand. And maybe, while you’re in there, you’ll find a way to bring Samaritan itself crashing to the ground and the lot of you can go about your regular business – saving irrelevants, spoiling the dog. 

The Machine addresses you again. 

 _Please_. 

She’s taking a page from Shaw’s book and for a second, you marvel at Her. Always learning, adapting to the humans she protects. Her plea is manipulative and emotional and you’re both annoyed and impressed at her perceptiveness. 

 _Analog Interface irreplaceable._

You sigh. 

It should make your heart soar, confirmation that you are loved by the God you’ve worshipped since you knew She existed, but all you feel is tired and frustrated because this is not how you thought Her love would work. You thought it would be wholesome and fulfilling and protective, not quite so selfish, so _human_. 

You were right about Her, and you’ve never so fervently wished to be wrong. 

“I’m sorry,” you say, because you are. You are Hers, but you are your own, too, and you’re sorry to have to show Her that. 

She is quiet for a long time. 

You are quiet, too. 

And then She isn’t. 

 _Asset: Analog Interface. Alias: Samantha Groves/Root. Status: reassigned._

Your rage flares again. 

“No. We are not doing this, I’m – “

 _Threat detected. Danger to Asset: Admin. Alias: Harold Finch. Chance of survival: 16.21%. Outcome undesirable._

You freeze.

Harold. 

 _Flight confirmed. Emirates EK651. Departs 10:05am Colombo, Sri Lanka. Arrives 3:00pm, New York, United States. Total trip duration: 20 hours, 5 minutes. Alias: Jennifer Manning. Confirmation code 534BXP6. Window seat selected._  

There’s a beat before you can process what she’s said. 

You sink to the floor. Every single part of you hurts like you’re being pulled apart, inch by inch. First Shaw, then the Machine, and now Harold, and it’s all too much. You thought you were prepared for this war, you thought you could handle it. 

You were so, so wrong. 

20 hours and 5 minutes means you will be on a plane when Greer calls. 20 hours and 5 minutes means Sameen will suffer. 20 hours and 5 minutes means you will relive this moment over and over again, because it’s the moment you realize you really can’t do both – save Sameen and save Her. 

(Saving Harold is saving Her -- you’ve known that since Claire Mahoney, since She whispered _Thank you_ to you after you’d returned Harold to the subway station.) 

There’s nothing you can do now but cry. 

 _Danger to Admin. Outcome undesirable._  

Your breath is shaky when you speak. 

“I know. I’m going.” 

It’s 6:47. You wipe your eyes and start to pack. 

\--- 

It isn’t until you’re on the plane, somewhere over Dubai that She tells you where the threat is coming from. 

When She does, you’re ready to take down the plane and everyone on it.

The threat is caused by Harold himself and it’s not imminent. Not yet. 

You don’t talk to Her for nearly 36 hours after that.

\---

She tells you to build an app to attract the attention of a software company for a reason She assures you will become apparent later. 

You do what She says, but you don’t speak a word to Her while you do it. 

You don’t know what you’d say.

\---

You dream of Sameen (a kiss, a shove, and the scream of bullets) and you claw at the cage and reach and yell and every time, it ends the same way. Sameen on the floor, staring up into Martine’s gun. 

You see her in the hospital room, Martine and Greer standing over her, pushing amphetamines into one arm and barbiturates into the other. Over and over and over until her heart explodes. You are just outside the door, and you claw and reach and yell and you can’t get to her there either. 

You dream of Her, fading and falling to Samaritan. You type letter after letter, every keystroke disappearing the second you enter it. You keep typing, coding, _trying_ until everything crumbles around you and the dust invades your skin, climbs into you until it sits deep in the pit of your stomach and you know it’s all over.

You couldn’t save Her either. 

Not Shaw. Not the Machine. 

When you wake up, the sheets are tangled around your feet, and you _ache_ so much that you feel it in your bones. 

\--- 

Professor Whistler’s office is neat, precise, organized, much like the library used to be. All of the books are alphabetized, student work organized by class. Pens are in a cup on the desk – only black and red, no blue – highlighters in the top drawer on the right. He fits here, like in another life he could have been happy at a university like this, holding office hours that no one attends, and grading poorly-written research papers. You wonder if She was looking out for him, taking into account his preferences, when She created Professor Whistler in a way that She didn’t with John Riley or Sameen Grey. Harold is special to Her, and She will take care of him in every way She can. 

Which is why you’re here. 

You start with the desk. She hasn’t told you what exactly you’re looking for – _Primary assignment: locate activation device_ isn’t the most helpful instruction She’s ever given you – but even if you don’t know the size and shape of it, you figure the desk is a pretty good place to start.   

It’s clever, what he’s trying to do. You’re almost hurt that he’s kept it from you for this long, that he isn’t telling you even now, with his friend’s life and his own at stake. But then, you’re keeping things from him, too.

You rifle through his desk drawers – paper clips, stapler, staples, post-its, nothing unusual. You’re pleased to see the tea you brought him from Sri Lanka in his bottom drawer with the “Nerd” mug Shaw had gotten him for Christmas last year, and you take care not to disturb them while you toss other things around. You could put things back carefully and he’d never know you were here, but you saw an opportunity this morning – the ex-husband back to beg for forgiveness – and you’re happy to tear things apart and blame everything on him so Harold never has to know.

The idea that Harold might some day find out what you’ve done, what you’re going to do turns your stomach but you can’t think about it now. You’ll feel sad later for the poor woman who has to die because Harold can’t. 

When the desk reveals nothing – you check the undersides of drawers and knock around the wood because you know Harold, you know he’s too careful to leave something so important in plain sight – you turn to the bookshelves. Harold’s first love has always been books, knowledge, and this is where you think you’ll find the device, if it’s in here at all.

You pull book after book off the shelf, flipping through each hoping whatever you’re looking for will fall out. When you’re done, you fling a few books around, knock over a lamp for good measure, and sit down at Harold’s – Professor Whistler’s – computer.

The guilt is ever-present, hanging over you since you made this decision to do what needs to be done. You don’t want to kill this woman, but you think of Shaw and Harold and Her and you know you can’t lose them. You are afraid of what you would become if you did. 

(You think of Lefty and an iron and how _good_ it felt.) 

It takes you all of thirty seconds to hack into the NYU Research Labs. They’ll have something you can use. 

_Asset: Analog interface. Alias: Samantha Groves/Root. Primary assignment: locate activation device. Irrelevant name: Elizabeth Bridges. Status: elimination unnecessary._

You ignore Her. 

There’s a research group looking into the effects of certain neurotoxins on cancerous cells, and you think that’ll do nicely. It’ll be quick. Painless. That’s the most kindness you can afford right now, and it’ll have to be enough to soothe your conscience. 

 _Elimination unnecessary._  

She won’t help you with an alias on this. You’ll have to do things the old-fashioned way. 

It’s been a long time since you’ve created this way – birth certificates, social security records – manufacturing a history, a life, with your fingertips. There was a time when you thought this was your calling, creating people with code and a little bit of ingenuity. But that was before She found you. 

 _Elimination unnecessary._

No, She won’t help you, but She won’t stop you, either. She tells you not to kill that woman, but you wonder if She knows you well enough to know that you won’t listen, that Harold means too much to you to risk losing him. She sent you here, gave you the information you needed, and now relies on you to do what needs to be done.

She won’t pull the trigger, but She’ll deploy the person who will.

She’s much like Harold in that way. 

You jot down the information you need and close the door behind you when you go. 

\---

You don’t think you breathe once in the time it takes you to get Harold to the hospital. 

(The Machine tells you it’s four minutes, thirteen seconds from the time he agreed to go and when you walked through the emergency doors at Mount Sinai.)

“We just want to monitor him for a little while, Ms. Lark.” The nurse lays a hand on your arm, and you try to smile. “Your uncle is going to be just fine.”

You feel a gentle squeeze and she’s gone.

The monitor beeps and you watch it for a while because it tells you he’s alive, and you can’t really bring yourself to look at him, sleeping and still. He’s pale and his breathing is shallow and it’s all too close to what you might’ve seen had you left the hotel room a couple minutes later. 

He breathes in and out and so do you.

“You shouldn’t have done this, Harry,” you whisper, your hand on his. His skin is warm and his pulse is steady and it’s enough to ground you. There’s so much left that you have to do but you need this minute here, with him, where he’s alive and you are thankful. 

You never thought you’d get to this place with Harold. More than the others, you think, your relationship with him was hard-won, built on the ashes of the monster you used to be. You fought for him, fought for his kindness and his trust, and you won it, piece by piece. He’s never trusted you completely, you know that, but he trusted you enough for your actions today to constitute a betrayal of whatever faith he’d put in you. 

You glance up at the security camera in the corner of the room. “Tell him I’m sorry.” The light blinks.

You move away from him and look out the hospital window and watch as the rain falls. 

Part of you is glad he’s asleep so you don’t have to see the hurt he’ll wear on his sleeve when he wakes up.  Another part of you is glad he’s asleep so he won’t see how angry you are with him for being so cavalier with his life.

You think of Shaw, twisting under a rain of bullets, and yourself, willing to march into hell to save her, and you know your anger is hypocritical – you all care more for lives other than your own – but you don’t care. He could have died, and he knows how much you’ve lost already. 

Except he doesn’t, not really, because he doesn’t know that Shaw is alive, that Shaw is with Samaritan, that she begged you to come to her, and that you failed her again. He feels guilty, but he doesn’t know the half of it. 

“I don’t imagine you’re going to believe me, but what happened to Ms. Shaw is not your fault.” It’s uncanny how he knows what you’re thinking sometimes. 

You don’t turn around to look at him. “It’s not yours either. How long have you been awake?” 

“Long enough.” 

A raindrop falls down the window and you trace it with your finger. “They have her, Harold. Sameen is alive and she needs us.” 

You hear him sigh. “I know you want to believe that, Ms. Groves. Root. And I dearly hope you’re right, but –“

“No, Harold. I _know_ she’s alive.” 

There a moment where you think about telling him everything, showing him what you’ve seen, asking him for help. You think about charging in to wherever she is, all of you – you, John, Harold, Fusco, even Bear – and charging out with Shaw in your arms and dead Samaritan agents littering the sidewalk. 

The images of John, shot on the floor of the Stock Exchange, and Harold lying still in his hospital bed flood your mind and you know you won’t say a word. 

“Did the Machine tell you that?” 

You almost laugh. “She won’t tell me anything.” 

He’s quiet for a long time after that. You think he might have fallen back to sleep, and you’re almost glad for it. It’s been enough of an emotional roller coaster today without bringing Shaw and the Machine to the forefront.

(They’re always there, in the background, but today has been about Harold and you don’t think you can handle much more than that.) 

The rain slows to a drizzle. 

“I suppose we’re all trying to keep one more friend from dying.” 

You turn around. He looks up at the security camera pointedly, then closes his eyes. 

You look up at Her, down at him, and you leave. 

\--- 

The clicks of keystrokes echo in the subway tunnel as you type. 

You hit “send” and wait. 

He’ll be here soon enough, once he realizes what you’ve done. 

\---

He places his hand lightly on your shoulder, caring for you in his own, hesitant way. 

“I don’t want to see you for a while.” 

It’s better than you were expecting – you thought for sure he would send you on your way for good, want nothing to do with you for how you chose to protect him – and you smile as best you can. You regret a lot of things about your life, but you will never regret the things you’ve done to protect the people you care about.

You touch his hand – still warm, pulse still steady – before you get up to leave. “Of course.” 

You don’t look at him when you speak again. “It was a brilliant plan, Harold. The Trojan Horse. But it would have gotten Professor Whistler killed.” 

As you make your way toward the exit, you wonder if this will be the last time you’ll see this place. Not because Harold needs space, but because you know where you’re going when you leave here, and you know you may not make it back. You pass Shaw’s cot on the way to the door. The sheets are still disheveled, the pillow squished against the wall, like she’d been there this morning and not a month ago. You smile at the thought of Shaw with bedhead. 

Harold has his back to you, so he doesn’t see you turn around, “goodbye” on the tip of your tongue. 

The trigger feels heavy in your coat pocket as you walk up the stairs and into the New York cold.

You’re on your own now. 

Places to go, people to save. 

\--- 

Shaw has an ungodly array of weapons in her fridge. The last time you were here (four days after the Stock Exchange), you were too frantic to really notice the extent of her collection. You grabbed the first big gun you saw and left, desperate to get away from her apartment and everything that could remind you of what you might have lost. 

The apartment is sparse but it suits her. A bed, a dresser, a television, a handful of dishes, a lot of knives. She’s never been one for excess, with few exceptions. Food is one of them – extra mustard, extra jalapeños, extra syrup. 

Weapons are another. Her fridge has every military-grade sniper rifle you’ve ever seen plus several you haven’t, a handful of grenades, maybe a dozen handguns, varying in size and caliber. It’s all big and loud and so _her_ that you have to take a step back for a second and gather yourself. 

Today, you don’t need something big and loud. You need subtle. A razor blade you can tuck into the padding of your bra. An explosive that can live in your shoe for a little while. A couple of pins to pick locks. You’re going to Samaritan voluntarily – you can’t exactly go in guns a-blazing. 

Greer probably wouldn’t appreciate it if your approach was to wave to Samaritan’s cameras, tell them to come and get you, and shoot everyone when they show up. You don’t imagine he’d be terribly inclined to take you to Shaw after that. 

It’s time for a scalpel, not a hammer.

Or maybe a little of both, you think, as you spy a tube of lipstick next to what looks like a grenade launcher. You remove the cap and smirk when you see the red and green buttons that control the voltage. Weaponized lipstick. Maybe Sameens’s department store job hadn’t been a total waste.

You close the refrigerator door and walk around to the bedside table. You let your hand drift over the wood, the lamp, the medal that dangles from it. You did the same thing the last time you were next to her bed, taking a few moments to observe her before waking her up with your taser. 

She hadn’t looked peaceful in her sleep. You’ve surprised plenty of marks while they were in their beds and every one of them except for her looked as vulnerable as the day they were born, their guards down, helpless. Except for Shaw. Even in sleep, she seemed alert. Ready to leap out of bed and take on an army. 

You were doomed to fall for her from the start. 

The top drawer squeaks when you open it. It feels invasive in a way the fridge hadn’t, but you suspect you’ll find what you need in here, and if it helps get her out, the ends will justify the means. You grab a handful of zipties and try not to look at whatever else might be in the drawer before you close it. 

(Maybe later, the two of you can explore the top drawer of her bedside table together.) 

(So much of you is sustained by thoughts of “maybe later” and “maybe someday.”) 

You take off your belt and tape the zipties to the inside. You’ll need them if she won’t cooperate, if they’ve brainwashed her so thoroughly that she won’t go with you voluntarily. There’s so much you don’t know about what they’ve done to her, or how deep it goes, and the possibilities keep you awake at night. 

It haunts you, whatever they must have done to her to bring her to their side, what they may have done to her since Sri Lanka, what may have happened to her because, when it came down to it, you chose your god over her.

You chose your god, who is as selfish and flawed as you are. 

Sameen deserves better. 

Greer’s words echo in your head _. I’m sure we can find ways to encourage Ms. Shaw to provide us with the information we seek._  

So you’re bringing supplies. You failed her once (twice, three times, again and again) but you won’t fail her now, even if means you tase her, tie her up, and drag her out of wherever she is. It would be poetic, you think, to come full circle like that. 

You’ll probably die. You know that. You’ve known that for a long time. That was always your role in this war – to die for something that you love. It’s just turned out to be a different something than you originally thought. 

You shove the drawer closed with your hip as you put your belt back on and head toward the door. 

 _Asset: Analog Interface. Alias: Samantha Groves/Root. Status: reassigned._  

You ignore Her and throw open the door, patting yourself to make sure you have the things you came for. Your gun sits on Shaw’s kitchen table, and you leave it there.

Your plan is relatively simple. Find a camera. Wave at it. Tell Samaritan you’ve changed your mind, that you’ll accept Greer's offer. And then wait. Someone will come and get you, and with any luck they’ll take you to Greer, Martine, and Shaw. 

The elevator dings. A middle-aged woman with an armful of groceries stumbles off and you get on. You’re alone and grateful to not have to make small talk on the 15-floor ride down to the ground.

The doors close and you press the button.

Nothing happens. 

You press it again.

Nothing happens and you are stuck in an unmoving elevator all over again with Shaw’s life on the line.

(A kiss, a shove, and the scream of bullets. Over and over and over.)

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

The security camera in the corner blinks, like She’s taunting you. You were expecting resistance, more reassignments, data about how likely it is that you’re going to die some horrible, painful death, but not this.

_Please._

You lean back against the cool metal of the elevator wall. Trying to pry open the doors is useless, and you’re sure She will have found a way to seal the ceiling hatch as well. She’s nothing if not resourceful when She needs to be.

_Evaluated probability of mission success. Asset: Analogue Interface: Alias: Samantha Groves/Root. Chance of survival: 7.62%. Outcome un--_

“Undesirable, I know. But you don’t get to make that call. I do!” 

The frustration comes off of you in waves and you’re so, so tired you almost don’t have the energy to fight. Not with Her.

_Analog Interface irreplaceable._

“I might be irreplaceable to you, but she is irreplaceable to _me_.”

The truth rips out of you, painful and raw. There are two things you love in this world, really love, and you desperately need Her to understand that, to understand why you’re going to go and why She needs to help you, or at least stay out of your way.

“You don’t want me to die. How can you possibly think that I’d let her?” 

She is silent for a moment. Some of the tension surrounding you dissipates. 

 _Answer unknown._  

“I know you feel guilty about what happened to Sameen, but it isn’t your fault.” 

The light blinks. 

“It’s not yours and it’s not Harold’s, and it may not even be mine.”

You’ve clung to your guilt for so long that you don’t even know what it is to set it free, but maybe you have to. Maybe you all have to.

“It doesn’t matter right now. What matters is that Sameen is alive and she needs us.”

Blink. 

You’re not sure what Her silence means, if She’s processing and trying to understand, or if She’s just ignoring you and refusing to let you out of this elevator. Or maybe she’s just quiet because Samaritan is an ever-persistent threat. But you keep talking anyway. If you are taking your stand, if that’s what this is, you need her to know what you’re standing for. 

“You programmed me.” 

You smile and remember late nights at the institution, a stolen phone reverently pressed to your ear while She told you every detail about the people surrounding you (your roommate’s favorite Starbucks drink was a frozen caramel macchiato, the nurse who handed out morning meds had two kids in college and a new one on the way and he was excited and terrified at the same time to be a parent again, your idiot psychiatrist had an ailing mother who smuggled children out of concentration camps during World War II). You remember who you were when you were getting to know Her. Who you don’t want to be again.

“You wrote out some of my bad code and you taught me to care about people. Let me be what you created me to be.”

 _Root_.

You smile.

Before you can reply, you feel a buzz in your pocket. Claire’s phone. You’ve kept it with you since Sri Lanka, charging it at night next to your own phone, hoping that Greer will call back, that Shaw will send a message, anything. The phone buzzes and you pull it out with trembling hands.

“Hello, Ms. Groves. I see you’ve hacked into Ms. Mahoney’s phone. Well done.”

You look up at Her. You don’t need to see this again. 

The video fast-forwards and there’s her face and your breath catches in your throat. 

“Listen, Root. I know you don’t want to hear this, but Samaritan isn’t the enemy here.” 

This isn’t what you asked for at all. You wanted help, not a reminder of what’s at stake if you fail. 

You tap the phone and press pause when Shaw is in the middle of telling you how wonderful Samaritan is. 

“I know they’ve got her drinking the Kool-Aid. I do. But it doesn’t mean she’s not worth saving.”

She fast-forwards again.

“Please.” Shaw is making eyes at you and your heart breaks a little more. 

The video skips and She’s playing it in a loop. 

“Please.”

“Please.”

“Please.” 

You turn to Her and the light blinks.

Blink. 

Blink. 

Blink.

“I’d even let you share my room and my shitty food.”

Blink. 

Blink. 

Blink. 

“Please.”

Blink. 

“And my shitty food.”

You tear into your bag. You put a pen in there, you know you did. You always keep a pen with you so where the fuck is it?

Even brainwashed Shaw wouldn’t offer to share food with you. Shaw could be brainwashed to love Samaritan, to turn her backs on all of you, but there isn’t psychological torture strong enough for her to think that sharing her food is a good idea. Shaw eats like she’s never seen food before and will never see it again and she definitely doesn’t share. She almost kneecapped you for stealing a French fry off her plate once and you laugh because of course she’s not brainwashed. Of course she isn’t. 

She’s way too strong for that. 

You rewind and start at the beginning, pen in hand. You don’t have anything to write on, not really – it’s not like you were really prepared for this – so you tally on your arm. 

You watch her face. Her eyes. 

Short short short.

S. 

Long. 

T.  

You’ve never been more grateful for Hanna Frey and her damn insistence that you learn Morse code after she read one too many Nancy Drew books. 

Shaw blinks at you and you swear you’re going to kiss her stupid face the second you see her because she’s brilliant and stupid and Jesus if Samaritan had caught on, who knows what they’d have done to her. But you see Martine’s face on the screen and she only looks bored and you think Sameen probably got away with it. 

You have to check, though. 

You pause the video. 

“Is she alive?” 

 _Yes_. 

The video starts again and you write.

Steiner Psych. 

“Location?” 

 _Steiner Psychiatric Institution. Formerly Triborough Hospital. 164 th Street, Jamaica, NY 11432._

You toss the pen back into your bag and you press the “open” button on the elevator so you can run back into Shaw’s apartment and grab what you left behind. You’ll need your guns if you’re going on a proper rescue mission. 

The doors don’t open, though, and you look at Her again.

The video starts.

“Please.”

Shaw bats her eyes – long short short, long long long – and you decode her final message to you. 

You rewind once, just to make sure you got it right. 

“Please,” Sameen says. 

 _Don’t die._  

\---

You break every speeding law in New York State and get to the asylum in 23 minutes. You park the car and your heart is pounding and you can’t keep the smile off of your face. She’s alive. You know where she is. 

You sidle up to the side of the building and pull your guns from their holsters. 

You look at the security camera hanging off of the corner. 

“Are you ready?” 

 _Affirmative_.

Your grin widens.

“Let’s go get her.”

\---

 

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! 
> 
> When I started this, I wanted to write a big, plotty "save Shaw" fic, but what I ended up with was my own 13k word love letter to Root (and the Machine). Writing this has been a rewarding experience (and a very good distraction from real life duties, like studying for the bar exam that I'll take next week), and a brand new one in a lot of ways. 
> 
> As a side note, there's a slight hommage to "All's Fair (in Love and War)" by fullyajar in the fight scene. It's a brilliant fic and I highly recommend everyone take an hour out of your day to read it and then cry about how beautiful and perfect it is. You can find it here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3907501


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